Sunday, 11 November 2012

In the countryside here, Halloween was the day to remember the dead, as the days grew dark again and the land grew gray and stark. It always felt appropriate to me, then, that it was so close to Remembrance Day -- Veterans Day in the USA -- when we remember the fallen. I also like that this day does not signify the triumphant nationalism I saw in my own country, but mourning for a tragedy.

Such rituals are not popular in our culture anymore. In the strange culture of the energy window, death is no longer the constant presence it was for our ancestors, so we have hidden it as we once hid sex, but behind veils less attractive than courtship. This age of inhuman speed and unlimited promise has removed our sense of passage, the sense that our uncommon lives are flowing to their common destination. Millions of us who grew up in this age, I think, will find themselves at the end, their busyness for nothing, wondering what happened to their lives, and unprepared for what happens next.

Saturday, 3 November 2012

Most of my countrymen are shocked when they discover the disdain in which they are held around the world; news media across Europe tend to regard US elections as a
comedy programme, endlessly replaying the most egregious flubs of the most dubious political characters as though they represented the quintessence of my native land.

Yet the US
election still dominates the headlines here, either because people
fondly remember the America that was or simply because US military and
economic disasters cause trouble for everyone else. As the resident
North American accent in the pub, I have to field a lot of questions about the
latest election news. I disappoint people by telling them that not only
am I not following the campaign trail, but I've also done everything I
can do avoid it.

It's not that I don't care. It's that my vote
takes a few days of research, not a year of hearing gossip. Before I
mail the absentee ballot, I make a list of the issues I care about and
compared them to candidates’ campaign contribution and voting records —
not the coverage, the records themselves — calculate my choice and move
on.

I want to see the United States restore its rail system, for
example, so any candidate that made some meager noises in that
direction gets some meager points on my list. Period. I don't care about
their race, their reproductive plumbing, their flamboyant piety or from
what wacky character they are six degrees removed. I don't care about
the teacup scandals that crawl across the bottom-screen news feed or the
hall-of-mirrors news coverage of the coverage of the coverage. I don't
want to know.

The mainstream media tends to treat an election as the Super Bowl, a New Top Model, an American Idol, the Oscars or
an apocalyptic smackdown. In reality, it simply should be a job
interview, and you are the employer.

Forget this idea that your
candidates represent two opposite ideologies. The two major parties
represent slightly different alliances of investors, smashed together by
the accidents of history. There is no other reason that evangelicals,
for example, should be in the same camp with libertarians, or
neoliberals with conservationists.

Finally, remember that change
mostly happens between elections in a hundred thousand living rooms and
library basements and county halls and percolates into the halls of
power under sustained pressure.

No election let women vote, or
created the civil rights movement, or laws to protect our air and water.
These things happened because neighbors met, organized, protested, ran
local candidates, went to prison — and moved and moved and moved until
they were a movement. America, and countries in general, get better when people get it into
their heads that they should be the ones running the country, and cajole
and intimidate elites until the elites back down.

This Tuesday, pick the guy you think will back down first.

This piece was adapted from an Opinion piece I wrote for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2008. I put in the blog two years ago, but thought it appropriate at the moment.